Tonight, the elected council of the Southwest Borough votes on whether to change its urban plan to match the PPU proposed in Projet Griffintown. This may represent the last time citizens, businesspeople and professionals get a chance to weigh in on these zoning changes and their impact on the entire city.

I’m not sure if they’re going to allow much time for questions or comments — but we’re going to show up en masse to remind them that they are elected officials, and if they want to stay elected, it’s not really a good idea to ignore established democratic processes, expert opinions, and the wishes of the people.

If you want to add your presence / voice to the meeting:

Arrondissement Sud-Ouest

815 Bel-Air (not too far from Lionel-Groulx metro, one street over from Rose-de-Lima)

Doors open at 6:30. If you want to ask questions, best to get there early and sign up.

Jeff Dungen, a resident of the Lowney Lofts and member of the Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown, did a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final changes that will be made to the Peel-Wellington sector:

Supposedly more green space and/or public places, they say, but according to (possibly badly drawn) new diagrams, it looks like a lot less now. The new plan seems to extend a space from Square Gallery Park down to the canal; there’s also a new public space / pedestrian area extending down Ann near or under the railroad tracks. This in addition to their pedestrian extension of De La Montagne through a “piercing” under the tracks to the canal, and a vaguely-defined public space where Peel becomes Rue de la Commune, again under the tracks, near the proposed concert hall / arts complex. On another map, a green area extending up from the Canal along Wellington appears to have vanished.

Rue Smith will be rehabilitated and not closed, and sections of Murray and Shannon below Wellington will be kept as pedestrian streets in the “lifestyle sector.”

The area below Wellington has had its height restrictions eased to encompass 70m buildings (!) where only 60m buildings were allowed in the previous design. That said, minimum street heights have been lowered to 9m from 14m, which should in theory allow for more human-scaled buildings at the pedestrian level.

The former “camillienne,” aka comfort station, at the corner of Wellington and Murray will not in fact be moved to St. Ann’s Park, but will be integrated in situ. Whether its vocation is still to be a museum for Irish Griffintown is still unanswered.

Most troubling, is that where four of the larger and more interesting buildings were planned to be “partially reconstructed,” the new plan shows outright demolition, with only the old police station on Young being preserved and moved to De La Montagne. Is this just bad diagramming or has preservation (or taxidermy if you want to call it that) gone out the window?